فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال شانزدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 63، پاییز 1390)

There is an important rule in Islamic philosophy: everything that originates in time needs a matter. Avicenna and Mulla Sadra adopt different approaches to make their views about soul compatible with this rule. Since Avicenna maintains that the soul is spiritual (immaterial) and originated, and the spiritual entity has the same relation to all temporal entities, he has to take the genesis of a particular humor in the body as what causes the preference of the origination of one soul over another; this has brought him great troubles, including the fact that on this view, the potentiality of a spiritual entity is in a material entity. Given this trouble and his particular philosophical foundations concerning the principality of existence, the hierarchy of existence and the substantial motion, Mulla Sadra can adopt the view that the soul is corporeal at the time of its origination, and thereby he can rid of this trouble and other troubles with which the theory of spiritual origination encounters.

Mulla Sadra can be conceived as the pioneer of investigating religious doctrines, including bodily resurrection, by a method founded upon intellect, Shari’ah, and intuitions. His main claim in bodily resurrection is that this-worldy human is identical with the human in the afterlife. He has presented some principles in order to prove this claim. The main question before Mulla Sadra is the identity of the soul and body. In his view, human will be resurrected with a body which depends to a soul, the body having an issuing dependency to the soul. And sicne this body and soul have moved from their material entity to a spiritual one, their identity is preserved in all stages throughout, and the body resurrected in the afterlife is not only like the body in this world, but exactly identical with it. In this paper I will examine the principles and foundations of Saraean philosophy concerning the explanation of bodily resurrection.

Some Muslim philosophers like Avicenna maintain that the bodily resurrection is not philosophical provable and thus they appealed to the sayings of the sincere (revelation), but Mulla Sadra seeks to philosophically prove and explain the doctrine of bodily resurrection which is emphasized in religious scriptures, on the basis of particular principles such as the principality of existence, hierarchy of existence, substantial motion, etc. In this paper, I will point to different views about the soul-body relation and different accounts of resurrection –in both philosophy and scriptures- and try to explain the deep and precise principles of Mulla Sadra for bodily resurrection.

Civilizational theology means: a) theological approach to civilizational issues; and b) civilizational approach to theological subjects. This article is going to study those two of "civilizational theology" based on new and old terminology of "theology". In the next step, I will consider the possibility of civilizational approach in theological themes such as "Unseen", "Hope", "Sacrifice" and etc in Islamic theology. To be sure, this new approach would clarify functions and foundations of Islamic theology in the formulation of Islamic civilization, and will responses to some theoretical and practical dilemmas in civilization.

Mullā Sadrā gives a novel account of the survival of the soul, which counts both as a philosophical proof of the resurrection, and a plausible analysis of the personal identity of resurrected people. Sadrā employs his principles of the emergence of the soul, the unificatory combination of the soul and the body, the substantial motion of the human being, and soul-body relation in a comprehensive account of the survival of the soul. He argues for the survival on the basis of his own notion of the soul-body relation in the framework of the substantial motion. The soul for the survival of which he argues, includes not only all the immaterial stages of the soul, but also the body as the soul's lowest stage. Thus it seems that Sadrā is able to account for the bodily resurrection on the basis of his analysis of the survival of the soul.

Mutakalimin’s view about the nature of the soul is simple and straightforwards: the soul is material and non-spiritual. Most of them have adopted the theory of “fine body” and take the hadiths to be evidence for this. Some of them take intellectual arguments to support this view, but others take the intellect to be silent on this issue. On this view, though the soul is material, it is not of the same sort as the body. It is independent from the body and might be a peculiar kind of material stuff which exhibits unique properties. Some have taken the soul to be from water, and took some hadiths as their evidence. This material element is not spiritual and cannot become spiritual. It can gain attributes such as knowledge, power and life by its relation with spiritual lights, but they cannot be united with them. Therefore, the duality of the sould and body does not lead to their essential divergence; the duality appears only in their properties.

In this paper, I introduce the causal version of property emergentism as an alternative for reductionism. After that, I show that the property of qualitative consciousness has the characteristics of emergent properties. Then, I elaborate the substance emergentism thesis and distinguish three versions of it. In the final section, I consider the relationship between four mentioned versions of emergentism with afterlife doctrines, both in embodied and disembodied states and identify necessary conditions for consistency of the considered versions with the afterlife doctrines.